1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system for supporting machine-to-machine communication. More particularly, the present invention relates to an apparatus and a method for supporting a location update registration process used for an idle mode operation of a mobile station in a machine-to-machine communication system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Research is being conducted on a Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication service supporting data communication between devices in which there is little or very limited human interaction. The M2M communication service is drawing attention in terms of cost reduction in managing devices through automatic control and communication, and is recognized as a technique applicable to fleet management of vehicles and products mounted to the vehicles, smart metering, home automation, and healthcare.
An M2M communication system supporting the M2M communication should consider support of a device which transmits and receives limited data only during a restricted time, differently from a mobile station in a general communication system. For example, a smart metering device may only transmit a value measured once a month to a smart metering server, and a healthcare device may only be updated with healthcare information from a healthcare server once a day.
Since such devices operate in an idle mode most of the time, an idle mode process defined in a wireless communication system of the related art can be applied. However, it is inefficient to apply a paging cycle of a device of the related art to the device which does not frequently transmit and receive data as described above. Also, a long paging cycle is not defined in the wireless communication system of the related art and thus should be defined.
A time-based location update registration process used in the idle mode of the wireless communication system of the related art can also be applied to the M2M communication system, whereas unique characteristics of the device should be considered. Particularly, a method for operating a location update registration timer of the related art applies the same value to mobile stations in the idle mode. When the same location update registration timer is applied to the device of the long paging cycle as in the M2M communication system, the mobile station frequently wakes up for the location update registration even when there is no data to receive. The location update registration process can cause considerable control signal overhead and power consumption of the device. Hence, it is desirable to define the location update registration process by considering the M2M communication service of the infrequent data transmission and reception as discussed above.